Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle,novel by Vonnegut, published in 1963.
Jonah, a journalist, goes to Ilium, N.Y., the manufacturing city where the late Felix Hoenikker lived, so as to write a book about that eccentric scientist and his invention of an atom bomb and of a crystal named ice-nine that will freeze anything aqueous with which it comes in contact. On a magazine assignment Jonah next goes to the Latin American island nation of San Lorenzo. There he learns of the black adventurer and ex-soldier Earl McCabe, who was the land's autocratic ruler until superseded by Papa Monzano, a dictator, who has been aided by Hoenikker's son Franklin. Jonah learns too of another black ex-soldier, Lionel Boyd Johnson, who has become the people's spiritual leader by the creation of a religion called Bokononism and the preaching of “foma,” useful lies. Papa Monzano kills himself with a bit of ice-nine that he got from Franklin Hoenikker, and when by accident...
[The entire page is 195 words long]
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